The Water Cooler

Science, Technology, Business, and Politics

Friday, May 23, 2003

kuro5hin.org || Tipping and Restaurant Service Quality Weakly Linked A meta-analysis (PDF) in Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly of 14 other studies reveals that "the tipping-service relationship can only be described as weak" and "...it is doubtful that servers would see the effects of spending extra effort to deliver good service...". In addition to this, the study finds that restaurant managers won't be able to accurately evaluate server performance or customer satisfaction by adding up tips: "...[tips] are not a good way to motivate servers, measure server performance or identify dissatisfied customers."

Problems like this come in a combination of personal failure and localized bias... it's intellectually dishonest to deny one without the other. Personally speaking, I prefer to think that when something goes wrong, it's my fault versus the system. If it's my fault, it's something that can be changed - if it's the system's, then there's not much luck to succeed next time.

Venture Capital: These students are all business After nervously adjusting their yellow ties, the two young businessmen launched into their presentation in front of a panel of seven judges. Describing the high levels of debt among young adults and the fascination with wealth, Sumner and Sims explained why they believe the world needs a new financial magazine that caters to those between the ages of 15 and 25.

Newsday.com - Blood of Innocents Now free to speak, the doctors at two Baghdad hospitals, including Ibn Al-Baladi, tell a very different story. Along with parents of dead children, they said in interviews this week that Hussein turned the children's deaths into propaganda, notably by forcing hospitals to save babies' corpses to have them publicly paraded.

At graduation last year, Madeline Albright spoke - outside, we had a hundred or so protesters that yelled in with megaphones, stating that she was to blame for the deaths of thousands of children in Iraq. It never computed that Saddam had all these palaces, and he was in charge of his spending, and yet it wasn't his fault. It was particularly unbelievable because Saddam had so much to gain in PR for the deaths of his own citizens.

Computing's Lost Allure An article in the New York Times, describes how the number of students majoring in computer science in university has dropped off with the rest of the hi-tech economy. The bright side: the students who are enrolling are doing so because they love computers.

Monday, May 19, 2003

Why psychology has got it wrong
Psychoanalysis was one of the "backbone" sciences of the 20th century, yet depression and behavioural problems are rife today. In the first of two articles, our correspondent explains why psychology has failed.

Of the three sciences mentioned in this article, physics, genetics, and psychology, which ones are actual sciences with testable hypotheses and which one is just made up crap? Have anything to do with their success in the real world?